"Same rights" - no sorry, somebody who stole before will be regarded with higher suspicion than other people, and that's OK.
How do you know they "learned not to steal"? Can you look inside of their heads?
There are jobs with less opportunities to steal, for example. Trust has to be regained, simply "having been in prison" is not really worth much in that respect. You would stay in prison, regardless of your mindset, because you are forced to be there.
As an Australian, I find that perspective awful. Going to jail is the punishment society has chosen for the crime. Once you've served your time, you rejoin society on an equal footing. Denying jobs to ex-cons makes it much harder for them to integrate back into society, and increases the recidivism rate. (Which you pay for via taxes.)
The equation isn't "bad person -> steals". Its "person maladapted to society / with unhealthy community -> steals". Why would someone be a thief if they have a stable job and community?
And how do you expect someone fresh out of jail, with no connections and community, to make a stable life for themselves if nobody will give them a job?
Not "nobody should give them a job", just not a job with ability to do harm. But that's for every employer to decide for themselves.
If you don't think somebody having done X before makes them more likely to do it again than normal people, I don't know. (More accurately, people who did X are more likely to be people who would do X again). We just have to disagree - but you can not enshrine such beliefs in law.
As I said, trust has to be regained, merely doing something you are forced to do anyways does not prove anything about your real attitudes.
In "How To Change Your Life In 7 Steps", the founder of the homeless magazine "The Big Issue" John Bird describes what he had to do to be able to have homeless people work for him. I have high respect for people like him.
The issue is risk. Hiring someone with a criminal record is riskier than hiring someone with a clean record. There is no upside to mitigate that risk either. So it shouldn't be surprising that hiring managers discriminate on anything they can legally get away with.
I'm sorry, but real people judging me is orders of magnitude worse than the Big Data thing they describe. They don't even provide any citations for the impact of Big Data they claim.
But they do. The social credit system in China is the perfect example. Makes it harder to operate in "real" space if you, for instance, have a "bad attitude". This is different than people just "not liking you", for the same reason. In that case, you still have total agency to start being a nicer person.
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
Agreed. This article didn't distinguish between "problems caused by Big Data" and "problems caused by your aunt on Facebook who would disown you if you post the wrong thing."
